EUROPEAN UNION, SEVENTY YEARS LATER

What we are approaching now, gradually but inexorably, is nothing less than the end of the world.

Dear Comrades,

On March 25, I delivered a speech in Rome at the conference Europa2057 organized by Lorenzo Marsili. What appears here is the full version of the speech which resumes a lot of the ideas I’ve been discussing on this page; my"Eurocentrism" detailed in a systematic way.

Enjoy for free,

Slavoj

The Treaty of Rome (officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community) was signed on 25 March 1957 in this very building. Where are we with the European Union today, exactly 70 years later? Since we are in Italy, I would like to begin with Antonio Gramsci’s remark from his Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena [fenomeni morbosi] appear.”¹ Everybody from the Right to the Left uses this claim to characterize our situation. For the Left liberals, the morbid phenomenon is the rise of new populist Fascism, and for the new Right, it is the excess of Woke culture (open gates to immigrants, support of transsexuality…). But I think we should take a step further here: Gramsci still thinks within the classic Marxist frame of transition from capitalism to socialism, and “morbid phenomena” arise when this transition gets stuck – say, we got Stalinism because the first Communist revolution occurred in the wrong place, Russia with its Asiatic traditions. So we remain within the same linear progress; there are just delays and detours.

Our later experience compels us to change this frame: the “normal” process of our history runs towards (different forms of) a final catastrophe, a self-destruction through ecological collapse, through the uncontrolled reign of Artificial Intelligence, through global wars – these endpoints of our history are the true morbid phenomena. In such a predicament, we should pull the emergency brake on our historical process, or, to quote Walter Benjamin from his “Theses on History”: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.”² The model Leftist actions today are desperate attempts to stop the destruction of our environment, to control the explosive development of Artificial Intelligence, to prevent a new world war. Along these lines, Bernie Sanders said in a podcast on 6 March 2026: “We need a moratorium on AI data centers NOW.”³ And we need such a moratorium to think – maybe the time has come to turn around Marx’s thesis 11: in the twentieth century, we tried to change the world without really understanding it; now it’s time to interpret it.

What we are approaching now, gradually but inexorably, is nothing less than the end of the world. So what does a true end of the world amount to? The shortest definition is: it doesn’t change only local events within a situation, it changes the coordinates of the situation itself. Let me paraphrase here an old joke from the GDR: Ursula von der Leyen, Putin, and Trump meet God and each is allowed to ask him a question. Von der Leyen begins: “Tell me what will happen to the European Union in the next decades?” God answers: “It will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under Russian domination.” Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then Putin asks God: “Great – so what will happen with my beloved Russia?” God turns around and starts to cry. Finally, Trump asks: “And what will be the fate of the US after a decade of MAGA rule?” God turns around and starts to cry… This is the true change, when God himself (who stands here for the big Other, the neutral frame that encompasses the situation) breaks down. In this case it is, of course, a catastrophic change: our basic coordinates of measuring the quality of public life are suspended and will have to be rethought.

The term that best encapsulates this “end of the world” is the one introduced by Trump and his team: “civilizational erasure.” In the 33-page document “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” quietly released by the White House in late November 2025, it is written that Europe has economic problems, but it insists that they are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” Marco Rubio elaborated this erasure: for him, Europe is abandoning the values that include “embracing Christianity and a shared cultural heritage, closing borders, and dropping climate crisis policies.” The US needs to see a reformed Europe, not just details of defense budgets, but a sea change in the continent’s value system.⁴

So what do Trumpian populists oppose to European self-erasure? They systematically take recourse to the rhetorical figure of castration in a primitive sense of emasculation or feminization. What pervades the populist discourse is the threat of immediate empirical loss of power, of our masculine vitality and enjoyment. This threat emanates from the Others (immigrants, sexual minorities, etc.) who are themselves perceived as weak and impotent.⁵ The paradox is that these Others are attacked by populists not because of their strength but because of their supposed weakness and helplessness: in this logic, their weakness is contagious and threatens to infect “us.” This paradox explains the way the extreme Right appropriates the term “freedom of speech” – not as the right of citizens to publicly speak the truth and criticize those in power, not as the protection of critical voices, but primarily as the right to enjoyment: in the populist discourse, the “loss of the freedom of speech” amounts to the impossibility of freely offending others, of uttering publicly whatever pops into my mind. What this amounts to in political discourse was clearly shown by what, on 4 March 2026, Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of war (no longer of defense), said at a press briefing about Iranians: “They are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities just four days in. /…/ Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”⁶

Along the same lines, on 10 March 2026 Trump said the US Navy chose to sink an Iranian frigate, killing more than 100 sailors last week, because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel, even though the ship posed no threat.⁷ And on Saturday 14 March 2026 Trump said that the United States may carry out more strikes on Iran’s vital Kharg Island oil export hub “just for fun”⁸ – remember that bombing this island may trigger a much wider war… Plus, one cannot but admire how Trump extends this logic of brutal war not covered by the legal system to the US itself: he declares those who protest against his regime foreign invaders who should be met by direct military force – he has made no secret that he wants Gavin Newsom and Barack Obama arrested. In Minneapolis, he used ICE troops as his private army operating outside the legal state structure to crush opponents.

The different reaction to the disclosure of the Epstein files in Europe and in the US clearly renders visible the civilizational gap that separates us from the US: while in Europe these disclosures already ruined many political and social careers, in the US nothing happens outside scandals reported in the big media. (One can even suspect that the attack on Iran took place to distract us from the Epstein scandal.) Trump’s stance is grounded in the notion of justice, articulated early in Plato’s Republic by Thrasymachus, who says: “I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” And he goes on to explain how “the different forms of government make laws democratic, aristocratic, tyrannic, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. In all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.”⁹

This is how Trump coordinates negotiations between Ukraine and Russia: as he told Zelensky, Ukraine should accept losses because Russia has better cards… No wonder Russia immediately endorsed Trump’s vision and practice: commenting on the ongoing events in the Middle East, Dmitry Peskov said: “Nothing like this has ever happened in human history.” When his interviewer pointed out that weapons were not as powerful in the past, Peskov replied: “We weren’t alive then, so it seems to us that it’s the end of the world now. /…/ Sadly, we have all lost what we call international law. To be honest, I don’t even know how to call on anyone to adhere to the norms and principles of international law. It no longer exists. It exists de jure, but de facto it no longer exists. What kind of law has replaced international law? It’s unlikely anyone can tell at this point.”¹⁰ OK, but did Russia not do the same with the attack on Ukraine? Plus, one cannot but note how both the US in Iran and Russia in Ukraine reject the word “war” for what they are doing.

Trump is the greatest peacemaker in the history of humanity, or so he claims. And, as we know well, the only way to achieve eternal global peace is through one big last war that will destroy all enemies of peace. As Trump repeats again and again, the US is not at war with Iran; together with Israel it is just liberating the people of Iran (in exactly the same way as Israel liberated Gaza, and the ruins in Tehran make it look more and more like Gaza…). Trump is thereby following his true master, Netanyahu, who is arguably an even greater peacemaker: Israel is now engaged in a total war aimed at bringing peace to the entire Middle East – and peace means here that Israel simply wants to dominate the entire Middle East.

And the Russian civilizational erasure? The Russian government has approved a list of 48 foreign states and territories accused of implementing policies which impose destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. The list was approved in accordance with the decree on the provision of humanitarian support to persons “sharing traditional Russian spiritual and moral values,” which Putin signed on 19 August.¹¹ States on this list are now officially designated as “enemy states” because they don’t share “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” – there is no talk here about a multi-polar world; you are the enemy of Russia simply if you don’t share its values. Obviously, these values are somehow shared by North Korea and Afghanistan – but Russia is not cheating here: what its respect for traditional values has in common with North Korean or Taliban ideology is the rejection of the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil in history. The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level: beneath all the talk about a new multi-polar world, there is the vision of a total war to extinction between the two opposites, and when religion directly enters politics, the threat of deadly violence is never far behind. We are thus approaching a global geopolitical catastrophe: Israel and the developed West against the Third World “anti-imperialist” majority, including countries like North Korea and Afghanistan. No wonder Russia was the first country formally to recognize the Taliban regime – Putin said in July 2025 that Russia considered Afghanistan’s Taliban movement “an ally in the fight against terrorism.”¹²

The umbrella of anti-colonial struggle will thus cover the large majority of countries which limit women’s rights and sexual freedoms. Who now still remembers that a year before 7 October 2023, the entire power structure of Iran was shattered by mass protests after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard murdered in prison Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish girl who refused to cover her head properly? In new conditions, feminist protests with authentic revolutionary power will largely become a thing of the past, and we will find ourselves in a world of unholy alliances between pro-Putin “Leftists” and Muslim fundamentalists. We enter the era of violent struggles along false lines of distinction (where oppressing women means anti-colonialism, where bombing big cities to ruins means the fight against terrorism), and we should entertain no illusions here: false struggles are as a rule much more destructive than struggles for an authentic emancipatory cause.

Putin legitimizes his power with Eurasian ideology, opposing to Western individualist liberalism the traditional values of family life, giving priority to the community over individual interests up to the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the state. Along these lines, Alexander Kharichev, a top Putin ideologist, formulated the basic features of the homo putinus, the supposedly “self-sacrificing nature” of the Russian people: “For us, life itself seems to mean much less than it does for a Westerner. We believe there are things more important than mere existence. That, in essence, is the foundation of any faith.”¹³ We should also notice here that even Russian state bureaucrats elevate the animosity towards Europe to an almost metaphysical level. Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, recently said that Kant, who spent his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Königsberg), has a “direct connection” to the war in Ukraine. According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose “godlessness and lack of higher values” began with Kant, that created the “sociocultural situation” which led, among other things, to the First World War: “Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to propose – although we’re actually almost certain of it – that it was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals […] that the ethical, value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.”¹⁴

Kant, Alikhanov said, is the “father of almost everything” in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism, and “even the idea of the European Union.”¹⁵ And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia. Alikhanov’s “crazy” statements are thus a useful reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

The most disgusting thing to do at this moment is to repeat with triumph the old motif “we were telling you for years that Ukraine cannot win…” – obviously true, but whatever the final outcome will be, Ukraine achieved an unexpected miracle in resisting Russia for such a long time. In such a predicament, the only serious option is to finally accept that we are entering a global emergency state: we are at war and only a full Western commitment can give Ukraine a chance. Our answer to the often repeated argument against Ukrainian resistance – “Ukraine doesn’t have a chance to win against Russia” – should be the old pro-resistance motto: if you resist aggression and fight back, you may lose; if you don’t resist, you’ve already lost. This is why, although the “Leftist” critics pretend to analyze the situation in a cold neutral way (and still speak of the Russian attack on Ukraine), the implicit but unmistakable joy in their jumping on Europe’s dead body, their repetitive praising of how Russia gave a lesson to Western imperialism, clearly falsifies their neutrality. To cut a long story short, in the global conflict that is gradually approaching its point of no return, they are obviously on the side of Russia and China.

According to peaceniks, the majority of Ukrainians want peace, but NATO controls Zelensky and his corrupted circle, pushing them to continue a proxy war of NATO against Russia. This stance treats Ukrainians as incredibly stupid: they have chosen war against peaceful existence, slavishly following NATO orders… However, today Ukraine is not confronting a choice between a calm inert life of small satisfactions or taking a risk which may well end in a catastrophe. Yes, it is confronting a forced choice: life or freedom? However, this choice has an additional twist: both choices imply death. If, in the present situation, you choose life (surrender), you choose death (disappearance as a nation, as Russia has repeatedly made clear). If Ukraine wants to return to calm daily life, it needs to take the risk of pursuing war (military resistance), i.e., of exposing itself to potential death. If it wants to avoid war, it faces with great certainty another form of death (disappearance as a nation under Russian occupation). It is the West which has the choice wrongly attributed to Ukraine: risking a war (by supporting Ukraine) or choosing peaceful life (by suffering the humiliation of betraying its ally).

But, as many critical analysts are pointing out, even the Western European choice of peace does not really guarantee a long-term peace because if Russia gets Ukraine it will in all probability not stop there but pursue its expansion towards the West, so that the European West will later confront the same choice in much tougher conditions. Here, then, the Western peaceniks (from Viktor Orbán and other radical Right figures to pseudo-Leftists) simply cheat by attributing to Ukraine the choice which is not even truly their own. The EU position should be to unconditionally support Ukraine up to risking war with Russia; with Ukraine falling, Europe is crippled. Ukraine is not far away, of no concern to Europe; it is Europe’s essential outpost. Peaceniks forget that occupiers always want peace: Russia wants peace in Ukraine (which means to crush resistance and dominate it), Israel wants peace on the West Bank (which means the accomplished ethnic cleansing there), in the same way that Germany during World War II sincerely wanted peace in occupied Europe....

As for the danger of nuclear war, it is Russia and ONLY Russia which evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. Remember that a year or so ago Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine. He said that “a number of clarifications ... defining the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons” are being made to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. He added that draft amendments to the doctrine expand “the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out.” In a pointed warning to the West, Putin announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state that was backed by a nuclear-armed nation would be considered a “joint attack.”¹⁶ Putin also said Moscow reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in case of an attack on Belarus, as it is part of the “Union State” with Russia – a special partnership between the neighbors and allies. We should always bear this in mind when we hear warnings that Ukraine provokes Russia too much… And don’t forget that Israel also constantly evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. Israel, which presents itself as the bastion of democracy in the Middle East, is now caught in the process of its own civilizational erasure – or, as Yuval Noah Harari put it:

“Judaism has survived, it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now – we can still prevent it – is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of two million, maybe more, Palestinians. From there, the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the last two millennia.”¹⁷

The pro-Israeli stance obfuscates the true danger of anti-Semitism today, a danger perfectly illustrated by a caricature published back in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse: two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians sit at a table, and one of them is holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” This joke turns around the standard argument against the critics of the policies of the State of Israel: like every other state, the State of Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticized, but the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes. When today’s Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israeli politics reject Leftist critiques of Israeli policies, is their implicit line of argumentation not uncannily close to the caricature from Die Presse?

So we have a clash of civilizations: the US civilizational erasure, Russian conservative readiness to sacrifice, and Europe – not to mention China. But what about the vast domain (in Africa, Latin America…) of countries outside the emerging superpowers? Frankly, I see no potential for a radical emancipatory change there. If we accept the thesis on the “clash of civilizations” as our ultimate reality, the only alternative to it remains the peaceful coexistence of civilizations (or of “ways of life,” a more popular term today): forced marriages and homophobia (or the idea that a woman going alone to a public place calls for a rape) are OK, just that they are limited to another country which is otherwise fully included in the world market.

However, this multiplicity of civilizations is not the entire truth. Each of these civilizations is caught in its own process of civilizational erasure where its darkest potentials explode, and there is a strong resistance to the hegemonic form of civilization. Europe is also the birthplace of Fascism, which is now returning in the guise of a new populism; Russian Eurasianism is a state-imposed ideology met with strong resistance rendered invisible by state oppression; in the US itself we see new forms of opposition to Trumpian MAGA at a local level, from New York to Minneapolis; in Iran the Shia reign has had to crush rebellions again and again. This is why, as universalists, we should search for alliances between those in Europe who defend the Enlightenment legacy, those in Muslim countries who oppose religious oppression (not just of women), etc. Solidarity is today not a peaceful coexistence of different ways of life; it is solidarity in the shared common struggle. I think Europe is in a privileged position here because its legacy provides the only frame we have for such universal solidarity. Those who complain about Europe’s civilizational erasure practise a true erasure in an unheard-of brutal way (the US, Russia, Muslim fundamentalists, Israel…).

With regard to the ongoing conflicts, such emancipatory universalism means that we should establish a principled link between them: Russian aggression on Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing are two moments of the same process of denying the very existence of an ethnic group (Palestinians, Ukrainians). If we support Palestinians but oppose Ukrainian struggle (as some Leftists do), or if we support Ukraine but tolerate what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, the final outcome will be catastrophic: Russia will succeed in presenting itself as the leader of the Third World fighting European imperialism. True, Europe oscillates here and limits itself to formal protests against Israeli “excesses” – such a stance clearly signals Europe’s weakness and unreadiness to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy. However, this weakness indicates that Europe still remembers this legacy and is not ready to join the new brutal world order without shared ethical values: it is not able to fully assume its legacy and redefine it as befits new conditions....

The choice between the Iranian regime and the Trumpian US is also a false one; they both belong to the same global world. So one can well understand the silent majority in Iran (silenced by the regime), who reject the regime but are also sceptical of what the US and Israel are doing – their stance is neither hope nor despair but uncertainty and fear. As in the case of Venezuela, Trump told CNN on 6 March 2026 that Iran’s leadership has been “neutered” and that he’s looking for new leadership that will treat the United States and Israel well, even if that’s a religious leader and it’s not a democratic state...¹⁸ so much for freedom and democracy. Consequently, in spite of all the horrors of the Iranian regime (it is almost as oppressive as that of Saudi Arabia...), we now have to support Iran. Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty. The saddest thing is here the role of Western Europe which, with the honorable exception of Spain, again missed the opportunity and behaved like a servant of the US. The US, itself a de facto colony of Israel, serially violates the sovereignty of other countries, now even of Spain. So yes, a regime change would be welcome in Iran – but what about a regime change in the US itself?

Does all this not sound familiar? We are back at the civilizational erasure of the US. Remember the scandalous Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky, where Trump and Vance demanded that Zelensky express his gratitude for US help to Ukraine and pay for it by opening natural resources to US companies. So, again, as in the case of Ukraine, you liberate a country to enslave it economically – Russia the eastern part, the US the western part. And the same goes for the attack on Iran: Trump has now dropped all references to returning the Iranian state to its people; he openly said he doesn’t care what regime will remain there, it can even be a non-democratic clerical one, just so long as it will follow US demands. To avoid a misunderstanding, I have nothing against arresting a criminal foreign leader, but this arrest should be grounded in a clear international legal form. In an ideal world, we should begin by arresting Putin, Netanyahu... and Trump himself. Together with Maduro, they should all share the same cell in the International Crime Tribunal in The Hague – I am sure they will find it easy to communicate since they speak the same political language…

All these morbid phenomena bear witness to the end of the world, a topic today accepted on all sides of the political spectrum. Many commentators hailed Mark Carney’s speech in Davos where he referred to Václav Havel’s essay from 1978, The Power of the Powerless, in which “he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this ‘living within a lie’.”

But at this point Carney makes a weird comparison: in the same way as, in Havel’s story, the greengrocer decides to take the sign down, we should decide to take our sign down, i.e., to openly renounce the old world order. There is nonetheless a big difference between Havel’s story and today’s situation: our grocery sign was not taken down by some dissidents who opposed the system but by the big powers themselves, especially the US, which no longer finds useful the system it imposed on the world decades ago. Free market competition and other international rules were OK for them as long as they guaranteed their privilege; now they are renouncing them because they became aware that in a new situation these rules can undermine their hegemony. Did Merz not say the same thing in Davos: “A world where only power counts is a dangerous place. First for small states, then for the middle powers, and ultimately for the great ones. Our greatest strength remains the ability to build partnerships and alliances amongst equals based on mutual trust and respect.”¹⁹

Carney and Merz were joined by Viktor Orbán, who wrote in a Facebook post that the action ordered by Trump to kidnap Nicolas Maduro is a “further proof” of the collapse of a geopolitical model: “The first days of this year reminded us that the liberal world order is disintegrating. The new world is only just beginning to take shape, and the years to come will be even more unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous,” warned Orbán, while reaffirming his government’s commitment to “the path of peace and security.”²⁰

The first thing to note in this quote is the passive form of the verb: “is disappearing” – no, this disappearance has an agent, and this agent is clearly the new populist Right. “This bargain no longer works” for the new superpowers, and Europe finds itself in a very difficult situation. How, then, are we to break out of this mess and arrive at emancipatory universalism? My axiom is: only through the European legacy. Some of us still remember the famous beginning of The Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies…” Could we not say that today the spectre haunting the entire world is Europe itself? All the powers of old Europe and of the new world order have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre of “Eurocentrism”: Boris Johnson and Putin, Le Pen and Orbán, pro-immigrant anti-racists and protectors of traditional European values, Latin American progressives and Arab conservatives, West Bank Zionists and Chinese “patriotic” Communists… Each of the opponents of Europe has its own image of Europe in mind: Boris Johnson enforced Brexit because he sees the Brussels bureaucracy as a mega-state limiting British sovereignty and the free flow of British capital, while parts of the Labour Party were also for Brexit because they see Brussels bureaucracy as an instrument of international capital limiting legislation and financial politics which would defend workers’ rights; Latin American Leftists identify Eurocentrism with white colonialism while Putin tries to dismantle the EU to strengthen Russia’s influence even beyond the ex-Soviet countries; radical Zionists dislike Europe for being too sympathetic to Palestinians while some Arabs see European obsession with the danger of anti-Semitism as a concession to Zionism; Orbán sees the European Union as a multicultural communion that poses a threat to authentic traditional European values, opening up gates to immigrants from foreign cultures, while immigrants see Europe as a fortress of white racism that doesn’t allow them to integrate fully into it… the list goes on and on.

In an interview back on 15 July 2018, Trump mentioned the European Union as the first in the line of “foes” of the US, ahead of Russia and China. Instead of condemning this claim as irrational (“Trump is treating the allies of the US worse than its enemies,” etc.), we should ask a simple question: what bothers Trump so much about the EU? It is the Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that, in order to cope with the challenges of our moment, we should move beyond the constraints of nation-states; the Europe which also desperately strives to somehow remain faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims, the Europe aware of the fact that humanity is today One, that we are all on the same Spaceship Earth.

This Idea that underlies united Europe got corrupted, half-forgotten, and it is only in a moment of danger that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe, to its hidden potential. Europe lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other, who both want to dismember it: both Trump and Putin support Brexit, they support Rightist Eurosceptics in every corner. What is bothering them about Europe, when we all know the misery of the EU, which fails again and again at every test, is obviously not this actually existing Europe but the idea of Europe as a civilization.

Trump is in some sense right: the European notion of “objective social democracy” (Peter Sloterdijk) has effectively reached its limit; there is no way to return directly to it. We are thus confronting a brutal choice: either we simply abandon this dream, leave behind our civilization and enter the Trumpian new barbarism, or we approach the difficult task of sublating the European civilization – sublating in the precise sense of the Hegelian Aufhebung: we leave it behind (“negate” it) and at the same time maintain it by way of elevating it to a different higher level. In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T. S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat new Right populists and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. Sometimes, the only way to resolve a conflict is not to search for a compromise but to radicalize one’s own position, in our case: to declare European sovereignty. The task is not to antagonize the US – here, pragmatic compromises are necessary – but to redefine ourselves. Europe often appears as weak and inert – true, but it is not afraid of its external enemies; it is afraid of itself, of its own emancipatory potentials....

The reason we should stick to the name “Europe” is that the European legacy provides the best critical instruments to analyze what went wrong in Europe. Are those who oppose “Eurocentrism” aware that the very terms they use in their critique are part of the European legacy? Alain Badiou begins his book True Life with the provocative claim that, from Socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth, to extricate them from the predominant ideologico-political order. Such “corruption” is needed most urgently today, in our liberal-permissive West where most people are even not aware of the way the establishment controls them precisely when they appear to be free – the most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom that we experience as freedom, or, as Goethe put it two centuries ago: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

The united Europe is still an economic power, so it should do something it has avoided doing for years, something both Russia and the US try to prevent at any cost: to proclaim the independence of united Europe.²¹ Is it too late, as the “Leftist” critics try to convince us again and again? Is Europe already dead, a rotting corpse? The very insistence of these critics that now (and there were many of these “nows”) Europe has finally committed suicide demonstrates that it is not too late – for such a decision, it is never too late. The new power blocs that are emerging around the world are just versions of new Fascism – just think about the axis of Russia–Iran–Venezuela. Europe should here be an exception: the only place of fidelity to emancipatory Enlightenment. Will the proclamation of European independence happen? No, in all probability – but its lack will be felt all around the world. If it does not happen, it is not because of external pressures – Europe is ultimately afraid of itself.

One of the latest expressions of the crisis of liberal democracy is the rise of a new form of leaders called by Da Empoli “predators”:²² leaders, either democratically elected or autocrats, who exert their power with disregard for traditional customs or for the legal system in order to thoroughly transform their country. Although there are aspects of predatorship in how Trump, Putin and Xi act (plus, is Traoré in Burkina Faso also not acting like that?), the two pure cases are Nayib Bukele and Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). The two confronted in a predatory way the big problems of their countries which could not be resolved within the scope of the established political system. Since MbS is constantly present in our media, let me focus on Bukele.

After becoming president in July 2019, Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan to reduce El Salvador’s 2019 homicide rate of 38 per 100,000 people. Homicides fell by 50 percent during Bukele’s first year in office. After 87 people were killed by gangs over one weekend in March 2022, Bukele initiated a nationwide crackdown on gangs, resulting in the arrests of over 85,000 people with alleged gang affiliations by December 2024. How did he do it? Gang members in El Salvador were tattooed with signs which clearly indicated their gang and position in it, so Bukele simply arrested all tattooed men, and he put them in big prisons where they have no privacy and are kept indefinitely; he is even expanding these prisons to receive persons from other countries (like the illegal immigrants from the US). The results were fast: El Salvador’s homicide rate decreased to 1.9 homicides per 100,000 in 2024, one of the lowest in the Americas. Bukele ran for re-election in 2024 and won with 85 percent of the vote… Critics complain that El Salvador has also experienced democratic backsliding under Bukele’s leadership – however, this criticism misses the point because Bukele openly emphasizes his violation of the democratic legal system, pointing out that this is how he succeeded, and voters massively agree with him…

Where does the need for such predators come from? The answer is obvious: they do acts which cannot be performed in our worn-out liberal-democratic multiparty system. Which acts? Let me evoke somebody who is definitely not a Marxist, Sabine Hossenfelder. In her recent podcast “Why I Fear for the Future,”²³ she said: “We’ve given up on climate change. This doesn’t look good for the future of our species.” If you get a tumor and have it operated on ASAP, you make yourself temporarily miserable to avoid worse consequences later. “Climate change is like that, just not on an individual level but on a species level. So we could make our lives a little more miserable now to avoid something worse down the line. But we don’t do that. Why not?” If an alien were to observe us, its conclusion would be: “Humans run into a problem whose solution required global coordination. But the only system they had for global coordination were market economies. And these humans never made sure that market economies properly accounted for environmental damage. This meant that the only system they had for global coordination worked against them.” This worries Sabine because “it means that we are almost certainly too stupid to solve other problems. Regulating artificial intelligence is a good example. We badly need to upgrade our ability to make collective decisions” – collective intelligent decisions based on proper information.

It sounds naïve, but it fully hits the mark: what we need is a mode of global coordination that will enable us to make intelligent collective decisions and to enforce these decisions; this mechanism should reach also beyond state levels and beyond market rules. As even a brief analysis makes it clear, the establishment of such a new institutional mechanism implies nothing less than what Marxists call a change in the mode of production: a change in the economy which establishes a social control over market economy and a new way to relate to our natural environment, a change in the entire political sphere and the sphere of state administration, a rupture in our basic collective self-understanding… is not one of the names we have at our disposal to designate such a new order “Communism”?

This is why some Leftists are tempted to claim that today’s China comes closest to such a mechanism of collective decisions which regulates and constrains the market, taking care of the long-term interests of our survival. I am ready to accept that China is at this moment the least bad of the three superpowers (China, the US, Russia), but I think that the non-transparency of its system contradicts the Confucian harmony advocated by China as its model of social relations. Just recall the latest mega-purges in the Chinese army (half of the entire supreme command was beheaded): did Xi not do this as a supreme predator acting without any public consultation? What we all need are such strong acts, but not accomplished in a predatory way – if this is the only way left to us, we are really lost.

And this is why the idea of the European Union is worth fighting for, in spite of the misery of its actual existence: in today’s global capitalist world, it offers the only model of a transnational organization with the authority to limit national sovereignty and the task to guarantee a minimum of ecological and social welfare standards. Our duty is not to humiliate ourselves as the ultimate culprits of colonialist exploitation but to fight for this part of our legacy that is important for the survival of humanity. Yes, Europe is more and more alone in the new global world, dismissed as an old, exhausted, irrelevant continent playing a secondary role in today’s geopolitical conflicts. However, as Bruno Latour recently put it: “L’Europe est seule, oui, mais seule l’Europe peut nous sauver.” Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us.

1. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, vol. 1, Quaderni 1–5, Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore 1977, p. 311. English translation quoted from Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971, p. 276.

2. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 1938-1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2003..

3.

4. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/15/europe/rubio-speech-us-europe-relations-latam-intl.

5. See Alenka Zupančič, Paranoiac Power (read in manuscript).

6. https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421037/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-gen-dan/.

7. https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-ship-sunk-for-fun.

8. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/14/us-kharg-island-oil-export-hub.

9. Plato, Republic, Book 1.

10. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/kremlin-claims-international-law-no-180000905.html.

11. The government has approved a list of countries imposing alien values on Russia — EADaily, September 21st, 2024 — Politics, Russia.

12. Russia has decided ‘at highest level’ to remove Taliban from terrorist list, TASS reports | Reuters.

13. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/11/06/homo-putinus.

14. Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine — Meduza.

15. Op.cit.

16. Putin reveals new rules on nuclear weapons in Russia’s latest threat (cnbc.com).

17. Lee Harpin, ‘Yuval Noah Harari warns of “spiritual catastrophe” for Judaism’, Jewish News, 9 June 2025 (https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/harari-warns-of-spiritual-catastrophe-for-judaism-at-unholy-stage-show-appearance/).

18. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/06/politics/trump-interview-iran-cuba-dana-bash.

19. https://www.dw.com/en/davos-world-economic-forum-2026-live-updates/live-75560683.

20. https://www.plenglish.com/news/2026/01/05/hungary-aggression-to-venezuela-confirms-collapse-of-liberal-order/.

21. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1pre7tr/europe_needs_a_declaration_of_independence_italys/.

22. See Giuliano da Empoli, The Hour of the Predator, London: Penguin 2025.

23.